She glances at me, then back at her needlework. The stitches she makes are small and even. She always holds the material close to her eyes to push the needle through it. In Hong Kong I kept telling her she should get around to wearing glasses, but she never did anything about it. She said she quite liked seeing life that way, blurred at the edges. It’s true there were certain things she seemed never to want to examine too closely, even her own image in the mirror, so it couldn’t have been pure vanity, or laziness.
‘It’s a hell of a risk, that’s all,’ she says. Her intonation is so similar to Campbell’s when she says it that I know exactly which horse’s mouth to blame. That is so like him, with his pursed-lipped, slowly slowly response to everything.
Fair enough, then. I won’t tell her what else is hidden in the garden. I was going to confide in her and no one else, but the haughty shadows the twilight draws across her face make me feel as if I’m looking at her from a distance, under a spotlight, observing everything about her I don’t like: her near-sighted desire just to see what she wants to see, her naïve, blind trust in the people who run the show, like Campbell, and her newfound enthusiasm for playing at Florence Nightingale on her day shifts at the sanatorium.
So I keep it to myself, my secret. Those seeds in the garden have to bear fruit, not just to stop us all from starving, but because I’ve got another plan on the go, one that I haven’t shared with Campbell and his pals.
I’ve been sending messages out of camp, glued into the insides of the van driver’s cigarette packets. Packages come back in on the ration trucks, in clean bed sheets wrapped up tight to conceal the leads and plugs inside. I take them and hide them in the garden, deep in the earth under my tidy rows of onions and dwarf beans. I’m the only one who knows where all the components are buried. I crouch down on the damp earth. While Campbell and Elsa and all the rest of them are feasting on pea soup, I’ll be building my own wireless, finding the right frequency to get us out of here.
But I have to wait, that’s the problem. Work and wait. And no one else seems to have the patience to wait with me, apart from Mimi. I know I can trust her, at least. They all think we’ll be out in a few weeks. And then, as one month gives way to the next, and we acquire layers of sunburn that makes us look older and tougher, they start saying that it’ll be the end of the year.
‘We’ll be out by Christmas,’ I hear people saying to Campbell in the queue for food at the canteen. ‘You’ll make sure of that, won’t you, Sir?’
‘I will most certainly do my best,’ he says in that slick way he has of saying something that is clearly not the truth but sounds closer to it than anyone else will ever get. That’s why people trust him, let him lead.
‘You do have faith in me, don’t you?’ I say to Elsa, tightening my grip on her hand, the needle digging deeper into my skin.
‘Of course.’ She pulls away to gather up her sewing things and gets to her feet. ‘I’m just going to look in on Mari.’
There’s a drop of blood on the palm of my hand where the needle pricked it, but it wipes away easily enough. I meant to sit and wait for her to come back, but I’m tired and aching all over. I get to my feet too, make my way to the quarters and fall onto my blanket without even splashing my face. It’s a toss-up between hunger and fatigue most nights. If I stay up too long after we’ve had our evening meal I can’t sleep. I end up chewing the bloody blankets to fill my mouth with saliva, in the hope it will make me feel something in my stomach. But if I go to bed straight after supper, there’s no time to see or talk to anyone, even Elsa, especially Elsa, no human interaction to distinguish one day’s hard labour from the next. Mari is sprouting before my eyes like a potato plant, and yet I’m so tired I hardly get to take any notice.
15th August
Now we are all waiting.
I sit under the shelter of the pine trees in the cemetery with Mimi, her hand resting on my knee. It’s quiet up here, with nobody much around. I get my list out and take another look at it. I consult it so frequently that it feels odd if it isn’t there, folded up in my right-hand trouser pocket, the corners starting to rub and wear away. Soon enough I’ll have to copy it out again. But I even enjoy that – borrowing pen and paper from Campbell and sitting down to go through my graph one more time, using a light-coloured pencil to indicate sowing times and a dark-coloured pen to show when the crops should be ready.
It’s almost time. Parsnips as misshapen as withered old men on park benches show me the firmest, whitest flesh when I break them open with my knife. Lemons like waxed suns start falling from the trees of their own accord, and I have to tick them off my list sooner than expected and go round camp begging for a basket to gather them in. The cucumbers are longer and thinner than they should be, with lumpy skins, but each slice streams with fresh juice.
Next to floppy ears of Ceylon spinach on the vine are rows of brassica and chard. I can already taste the tough green stems. I rub celery leaves together between my fingers and hold them to my nose. Gooseberries have sprung up with the help of makeshift canes; a few loose clusters have started falling to the ground with a soft thwock, splitting open to reveal their translucent husks. The golden skins of onions the size of my fist are on the verge of breaking and peeling away from the layers inside.
It is Sunday night and I walk around the garden, checking on my produce. Soon it will be brought into the kitchens to be chopped, pickled, preserved, bottled, jellied, or just eaten. I kneel down and breathe in the smell of roots growing and holding onto the soil, not letting go until their work is done. I feel around among the tubers with my fingers, discreetly, so no one will notice. It’s still there, my underground network of electrical components. One or two may have been spoiled in the sudden rainstorm that blew southwards over the peninsula last week, but I’m happy to bet it’s mostly good to be harvested along with the rest. This is the perfect time: Kob and Fuji have become fattened and lazy. They even pant as they try to keep up with their pet dogs.
I see Elsa’s tall shadow coming towards me. I straighten up before she notices the knobbled earth underneath our feet where, under the criss-cross of cabbage stalks, metal rods protrude here and there like the ribs of an underfed child.
She offers me a cigarette.
‘Where d’you get them?’ I say, as we saunter up to the top of the cemetery.
‘One of the doctors gave me a couple of packs.’
There’s been a dysentery outbreak in the main school building. Lizzie Vernon offered to sit with Mari so Elsa could work round the clock at the sanatorium, sitting by people’s beds, mopping their hands and faces at regular intervals, fetching Campbell if they seemed to be getting worse. During the day the women who work in the laundry room have been flat out washing sheets and hanging them across the yards to dry, kids skipping in and out of them, making ghost noises and jumping out at each other from behind the damp linen.
I take a fag off Elsa as we sit down. We smoke with our backs against the trunk of a casuarina tree, listening to the breeze ruffling its leaves. Elsa is much skinnier than she used to be. Even her fingers are as thin as string. Her hands look like my mother’s: dry and wrinkled and bleached by soap flakes. They are hands that work hard. But lying back like this holding her cigarette, she reminds me of how she was before I married her. She had a smooth exterior, but she was unsophisticated, just another one of the village girls who were so easily impressed by my naval uniform and gifts from exotic places. We got married pretty quick – a shotgun wedding, Mam called it. When I asked Elsa if she would marry me she said yes straightaway, then cried, as if she’d been waiting for me to pop the question for all of the three months we had been fully acquainted. She cried on our wedding day, too.
I stub my cigarette out on the grass and roll over onto my front.
‘God, my shoulders are aching.’
‘Here, let me rub them for you,’ she says, balancing her cigarette on a rock and rolling up her sleeves. She bends over me and lifts the back of my shirt.
She presses her fingers into the muscles at the base of my back, then pummels her way up either side of my spine to my shoulders. The knots in my back loosen abruptly, making me groan. Her hands travel back down my back, lightly this time. She skims her fingertips all the way down my back, feeling her way round to my crotch. She smells of something bitter, like thiamine. Something from the medicine cabinet at that bloody hospital.
Instead of rolling over and pulling her on top of me, I shift and turn away. I wait for her to ask me what’s wrong, but she doesn’t. She picks up her cigarette and takes another drag on it, looking over the shallow bay.
20th August
Bridge is the last thing on anyone’s mind, apart from Fuji and Kob. Elsa and Campbell and I are called over to headquarters at weekly intervals for a round of cards and whisky. When other people get to hear of it as a regular thing there’s a bit of leg-pulling, until they get jealous.
‘In with the Japs, are we?’
‘Playing cards with the Nips, eh?’
‘And what do you get in return, that’s what I’d like to know?’
We are getting quite a bit in return, by now. As well as the garden, there is a regular supply of medicine coming in – far too little to keep everyone healthy, but it’s something, as Campbell says. It also keeps the Nips in a good mood, which is no bad thing. Parade is a long and miserable process when they are ill-tempered. People are pulled out of line, knocked about, and pushed back again. Elsa tries to hold Mari so that she can’t see, but she swivels her little head and watches as people are batted down to the ground with the edge of a bayonet. It’s usually men, but sometimes women. When they found out that a couple of girls were offering their services around the camp in return for a tin of bully beef, they hauled them out to the front, made them strip and slapped them about. I was standing behind Campbell. I heard him clearing his throat and saw a vein swelling in the back of his neck. I kept quiet too. Perhaps I’m coming round to his way of thinking. The greater good, that’s his argument. And he and I will be no use to the three thousand people here if we get shot for the sake of a couple of prostitutes. So we watch like everyone else as their clothes are ripped off them and they are smacked across the face. Poor kids. They’re only kids after all. Scrawny too, now. The Japs tell them that will be the last time they indulge in any monkey business. The truth is they’ll be at it again before you can say how’s your father. And their customers aren’t just Brits who are missing their wives. They’ve had a few Japs, I’d say, and although they cry themselves to pieces when they’re being embarrassed and beaten about in front of everyone, chances are they’re crocodile tears that will dry up quickly enough when their Jap boyfriends offer them a bit of consolation in the shelter of one of the godowns after dark tonight.
‘Poor girls,’ Elsa says, as we walk over to the superintendent’s house for our bridge session.
Campbell says nothing. He’s such a stuffed bloody shirt.
‘I’m getting sick of this,’ I say.
‘What?’ Elsa sounds tetchy.
‘Turning up here every week like lapdogs and getting hardly anything in return.’
‘We don’t have much choice,’ Campbell says.
The session doesn’t go well. I am getting better at this stupid card game, but Elsa seems to be getting worse. She’s not used to being in company any more. She watches everyone else as they play instead of studying her own cards, biting her nails and chewing the skin at the edges of her fingers. Fuji and Kob don’t seem to notice; they are distracted tonight too. They had whisky served the moment we came in, but didn’t offer us any. Now they are scratching their heads over their cards, blinking and yawning. Kob has put the radio on, I don’t know to which station. A woman’s alto voice croons in the background.
‘Elsa, dear.’
There’s something about Campbell’s tone that reminds me of the variety show put on by the entertainment committee in the canteen the night before. It’s a notch louder than it should be. I was never one for amateur dramatics, but it was good to see the kids enjoying themselves at least, dressed up in wigs made of unravelled rope and costume jewellery fashioned from corned-beef tins.
She glances at him, lets her hand drop into her lap. She moves closer to observe the cards with him. He turns to her and asks, ‘Shall we pass this time, do you think?’
It is as she nods her agreement that the penny drops.
They are sleeping together.
I stare down at my cards and watch as the black clubs merge into spades. I know that if they were alone he would put his hand over her chewed fingers and tell her that he loves her. I’m about to stand up and start roaring the place down – I don’t give a shit what Fuji and Kob think, they can bloody well shoot me for all I care – when the door is opened, and two men walk straight at us. There is a pop and a flash in my face and I think I must be about to die, my bloody heart is jumping about so much, and then I smell the acidic vapour of magnesium burning off, and see the round silver circle of a camera bulb, flat as a frying pan.
Fuji gets up and turns the radio off. There is a small boom inside the box, and an amplified click before it goes quiet.
‘We have visitors,’ he says, showing his teeth, ‘This is Mr Tan of the Hong Kong News. He’s come to write an article about Stanley.’
I see Campbell weighing up the situation. I see Elsa looking at him too, a look that burns a hardwired filament right through my heart, scorching me from the inside out.
‘Sirs, Madam,’ says a Chinese man carrying a fedora and notebook, coming forward and shaking hands with us in turn.
We sit around. The cards stare up at us from the table.
‘So life is pretty good in here, you would say?’
The journalist turns to Campbell first.
Campbell’s orange hair has been burned to blond by the sun. His forearms are covered in sunspots.
‘Reasonable.’ He looks straight at the journalist to let him know how far off the mark this one word is, and we all watch as the journalist writes it down and underlines it.
Fuji waves a cigarette around in the air before tapping out the ash into an ashtray.
‘They’re very well looked after. There are food rations provided each day for every prisoner, the same for every prisoner to the gram. They have their own sanatorium stocked with medicines and drugs of all kinds. They are supplied with healthful activities for mind and body, amateur dramatics and gardening, for instance. Tell them about the garden, Captain Jones.’
‘I am growing vegetables,’ I say.
‘Yes, by the time we leave, they won’t even need us.’ Fuji’s eyes crease up, to show just how amusing a prospect this is.
‘Leave, Sir?’ the journalist asks, pen hovering above the paper.
‘Yes,’ Fuji says, blowing smoke out over the table. ‘General Kobayashi and I are returning to Tokyo shortly.’
‘Who will take your place?’
Fuji waves his hand.
‘Someone will be sent over in the near future.’ He turns to Campbell. ‘The same conditions will apply. You abide by our rules and you will continue to be well treated.’
Kob looks at the abandoned cards on the table, examining each one carefully as if they were tarot cards, our futures exposed for all to see.
‘They’ve screwed up somewhere along the line, haven’t they?’ I say as we walk back to quarters afterwards. ‘They’re a pair of lazy bastards who are being thrown out.’
We’ve reached the Indian quarters. For once Campbell has nothing to say. He just keeps on walking towards his bungalow, raising a hand by way of farewell.
‘See you in the morning,’ I say to Elsa, and walk quickly up the stairs to my dormitory, with her voice ringing up the stairs after me: Nos da, cariad, as automatic as the flash bulb on that camera.
I lie in the darkness listening to five other blokes snoring around me, the corner of my blanket stuffed in my mouth, chewing mechanically. I’d looked forward to my glass of whisky tonight and
I hadn’t had it. Maybe I was more upset about this than anything else. I had been imagining all day how it would feel, the hit of sugar and alcohol to my brain and stomach at the same time, that full feeling only booze can give you. Those whiskies were better than a Stanley meal. They certainly kept me going for longer. It was clear from tonight’s conversation that they were over indefinitely.
And then I think of Elsa, and my mother, what she’d said when I told her we were engaged to be married.
‘Another cup?’ She’d held the teapot up in the air for a moment before starting to pour. ‘You’ll have to watch her, you know.’
I don’t care about anything anymore, except the fact that I didn’t get my whisky tonight and there’s a gnawing, gaping feeling in my stomach that I can’t get used to.
But what would cross my mam’s mind if she saw that photograph: Elsa, Campbell and me captured on a long exposure, playing cards with Kob and Fuji? What would she make of that single instant impressed into newsprint, blackening her fingers as she read the story underneath?
25th August
It is so hot that the entire surface of the peninsula seems to crackle in the sun. Grassy patches have worn away to yellow scorch marks, and the bouldered outcrops are hot enough to boil a pan of water.
At morning parade Fuji and Kob announce that in order to mark their final week at Stanley, they are to permit swimming. We are to take provisions for the afternoon and proceed to Tweed Bay, down the steep concrete steps leading from the hospital to the sandy beach below. We will be accompanied by a full complement of guards.
People are allowed to go down in groups of twenty or so at a time. It takes a long time to get everyone down to the beach. There is no strength left in any of us, even the children. They don’t run down to the water and splash their way through the shallows, although it must be warmer than a hot bath by now. They walk, and as soon as they come across a free spot they roll themselves down to a sitting position on the sand.
One young woman walks past me, limping badly, her legs swollen with beri beri. A young boy has mosquito bites all over his back. Some of them have been scratched so much that they have become infected with pus and look as if they will leave permanent scars. Almost all the men look exactly the same: stick thin legs and arms, concave chests, and distended stomachs. The picnics people have brought with them look quite normal from a distance: sandwiches, cans of water and so on, but close up you can see that the lunches are made out of foul-tasting rice bread and heavily salted fish, served in tiny squares, two per person. And the cans of water are only half-full, because we have to keep some of today’s cooled water for supper. In fact there will be no supper, because we all voted to bring our day’s rations down here and make an afternoon of it. The best we can expect is a spoonful of rice stew before bed.
The Rice Paper Diaries Page 10